Free Woman
Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
'A fascinating mix of literary criticism, cultural history and memoir … Highly enjoyable' Sunday Times
How might we live more freely, and will we be happier or lonelier if we do? Rereading The Golden Notebook in her thirties, Lara Feigel discovered that Doris Lessing spoke directly to her as a woman, writer and mother in a way that no other novelist had done.
Veering between admiration and fury at the choices Lessing made, Feigel conducts a dazzling investigation into the joys and costs of sexual, psychological, intellectual and political freedom. The result is this genre-defying book: at once a meditation on life and literature and a daring act of self-exposure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Feigel (The Love-Charm of Bombs), a senior lecturer in English at King's College London, weaves together two narratives: the life of acclaimed novelist Doris Lessing (1919 2013) and her own life story, both seen in terms of the search for personal freedom. Feigel is a fine writer and renders Lessing's quest in riveting fashion. Her own story is more problematic, perhaps because she is in the middle of it, but it does provide an up-to-date counterpart to Lessing's midcentury journey. Lessing sought freedom from middle-class constraints in various ways: by escaping her London house for the Zimbabwe bush of her childhood as often as possible, by abandoning her own young children, by supporting communism for a time, and by pursuing writing. Feigel paints Lessing's suffering and courage convincingly. But, while she soars in writing about Lessing, conveying her own life proves more of a struggle for her. While an unadventurous life is no crime, Feigel's attempts to learn from Lessing's example only result, ironically, in small, safe moves, such as swimming nude, or in "so bourgeois an acquisition" as the summer home she and her husband purchase. Her concluding takeaway is not enlightening: that it is "childish" to seek personal freedom and that instead one should accept one's lot in life. Readers who can get past the less-insightful memoir passages will enjoy the intelligent and well-expressed exploration of Lessing's uncommon life.
